


Unrecognizable to Myself

by BrooklynBugleBoy



Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Angst and Feels, Brian Needs a Hug, CPR, Chronic Illness, Congenital Illness, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, First Love, Freddie Mercury Lives, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Grief, HIV/AIDS, Heart Transplant, Hospitalization, Hospitals, John is a Bit Not Good, John is a Mess, Kid Fic, Lots of Crying, M/M, Medical Procedures, Men Crying, Other, Pain, Polyamory, Pregnancy, Roger being Roger, Sad, Scars, Sick Fic, Smoking, Why Do I Keep Adding Shit, heart condition, parenting, practice, talk of child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-20 03:21:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17614466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrooklynBugleBoy/pseuds/BrooklynBugleBoy
Summary: Another way the pre-Live Aid reunion could have gone. In another time, in another world.(A.K.A John and Veronica's middle child is born with a terminal heart condition.Freddie's off recording in Munich, Brian and Roger aren't returning his calls and John's world is falling to pieces around him).





	1. Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away...

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys!!!! 
> 
> I just wanted to practice writing in a limited third present tense! It's my first time so if it gets sketchy please let me know. This is just straight up sad and wowza. Just ....wow. Also @UniversesVisiting bet that I couldn't make it end happy. So... I tried. Kinda... Not really ;)
> 
> Features: You Found Me by The Fray! Also the title is from Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen :D
> 
> ALSO!!!! February is Congenital Heart Defects Awareness Month!!! Try to get involved, it is a very worthy cause. This fic takes place in the early/mid 80s, and treatments have certainly improved but 1 in 100 kids is still born with CHD :( And many CHD warriors lose their battle for life before they even have one.

_“I found God on the corner of First and Amistad_  
_Where the west was all but won_  
_All alone_

  
_Smoking his last cigarette_  
_I said: where you been?_  
_He said, ask anything.”_

 

 

They have the ultrasound, their first ever, on a Friday afternoon.

The handheld technology is new and isn’t actually meant to be used in low-risk pregnancies like Ronnie’s.

But with three small children at home and a completed pregnancy just a few months before, the doctors are mildly worried about how her body will cope with the sudden changes of a second pregnancy. She and John are getting on in years after all, and the last thing they want is to cause ripples unnecessarily. So why not experience the newest medical advancement?

At least they’ll know if the new baby is a boy or a girl.

John thinks girl, they have two boys and a little girl at home already, but he still thinks girl.

Yet as the transducer wand rolls over Ronnie’s belly, still littered in fresh red stretch-marks and less than taut skin from Lo’s birth. (She’s still the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, having his fifth child, and yet somehow equipped with all the love in the world for every single one). He watches the little blob of their daughter on the fuzzy screen, waiting for the confirmation of what he’s seeing and utterly wowed by all in front of him. What a nifty little gadget… He stifles the urge to play with the thing. His engineer’s fingers itch to take the whole mechanism apart and search out why and how it works.

He waits with bated breath for the comment that never comes and instead sees the way the sonographer stiffens, as though shocked by some sort electrical pulse that they can’t see or feel.

With a slow and steady hand, the transducer gently pulls away from the milky white alps of Ronnie’s stomach and is quietly set aside on a nearby tray.

"The doctor will be in shortly!" 

 _Slam, click._ Goes the door. 

That’s when John starts to worry, his blood trickling down through his veins instead of up, turned icy cold by the anxiety. Ronnie’s hand tightens in his own.

The transducer wand is back on her belly the moment Dr. Atkinson reappears, long white coat trailing behind her like the great white plumes of a cloud. Within minutes there is a lot of clicking and examining, zooming in on the grainy screen. Both of them are rendered near speechless by it, John’s heart is barely beating inside his chest. Something is wrong. Something is horribly horribly wrong, he feels it inside the worst parts of himself.

It has been nearly six months and three children, and John has never once seen that look on Florence's face. 

"Is everything... alright?" 

She doesn’t answer him, yet her eyes are too bright.

When she does speak, it’s with words that John can’t understand, but that he knows aren’t good. She’s speaking to a nurse who guards the door with dower heavy eyes of her own. “Notable size difference between the right and left sides of the fetal heart, visible structural and functional abnormalities. Including but not limited to an absent tricuspid valve, atresia of the pulmonary valve, secundum defect of atrial septum, with a tricuspid valve orifice that’s hyperechoic and thickened. He's only in the fifth percentile for Estimated Fetal Weight and Femur Length. That's atypical, he's tiny, he’s so so tiny.”

John can’t speak all of a sudden, he doesn’t have that power anymore, it’s Ronnie who speaks.

Ronnie who is still holding his hand with her wide, terrified eyes.

Ronnie who has always been so much stronger than him.

All he can think is that Florence had said _He._

_A baby boy._

They’re having a _son_. A little brother for Robbie, Michael and Lo.

"What does that mean? He's _little?_ Are we talking about _dwarfism?"_

Her voice is grating, terrified, holding onto him like she thinks she’s going to lose the both of them in one fell swoop. John doesn’t even know what to say in response, he doesn’t know how to feel. All he can do is look at the frozen sonogram on the screen beside them and analyze it for imperfections. But for all the frantic and stifling worry in that exam room, all he can see is their son. His precious little baby boy, who will be raised in a room painted with yellow sunflower skies and a hand-wrought crib with circus animal sheets. 

His youngest, his baby.

He doesn’t listen to the conversation between Florence and his wife, he only thinks about how they can do this… how he can save his son.

Because the baby is going to live.

The baby is going to live.

The baby is not going to leave him like Freddie did.

Staring out that godforsaken window, cigarette in hand, as he ripped John’s heart out of his chest.

The baby is not going to leave him like Brian did, puttering off to work on solo material and channel his feelings into his melancholia instead of his family.

The baby is not going to leave him like Roger did, focusing on his drumming and mistresses and drowning his sorrows in anger and alcohol.

The baby is going to live.

The baby has to live.

. _..there's something wrong inside..._

_...something wrong with his heart._

_I'm so sorry._

_Maybe if we'd caught it earlier..._

_...termination would be..._

_Concerning the sanctity of human life..._

_But quality of life will be..._

_...limited..._

_...lifespan..._

_So sorry._

Their OB/GYN isn’t sugar-coating anything.

She doesn’t have that luxury. 

"I'm going to set up an appointment for you with one of the best high-risk OBs in this area, Dr. Sybil Ludington. She can help give you some ideas on what your next steps should be." 

"Next steps?” Ronnie’s voice is thin, brittle as glass. They’d woken up with such excitement that morning, he’d even bent to press a kiss to her belly, caressing their youngest.

"As in identifying what we're dealing with here and whether or not it would be prudent to continue any further with this pregnancy." 

_Abortion._

The word is slick, heavy and yet abrupt inside John’s mouth. The forced stopping of a car by a precariously placed stop sign. A period. An ending. But at twenty-three weeks, is it even considered an abortion anymore? Isn’t it called something else? Partial birth? Late-term? 

_Murder?_

_…Mercy?_

Dr. Sybil Ludington looks like a Doogie Howser medical prodigy, barely into her twenties as she sits down before them in orange Charlie Brown scrubs. Several in-depth films of their unborn child are set down between them.

With the chewed-on cap of a purple ballpoint pen, she shows them the abnormalities in their " _fetus_ ".

“It’s called _Hypoplastic Right Heart Syndrome_ , effectively your fetus only has half a working heart. The big issues are the structures on the right side of the heart: _the tricuspid valve, the right ventricle_ and _the pulmonary valve_ , which are either malformed or absent. Your fetus has _none_ of these structures and it’s far too small. Sitting in the fifth percentile means that ninety-five percent of fetuses are bigger than yours at this age of gestation. Anything lower than the tenth percentile is _not good._ It’s possible that more defects can arise as it grows. It’s also possible that the ones it already has are enough to make life outside the womb an _impossibility_ …”

"Here's the bottom line." Sybil says with those dark and piercing eyes of hers. "If you want to terminate, then there are steps we can take to make that as painless as possible. If you want to continue onward with this pregnancy, then there are two possible outcomes to consider. _One_ , that the baby dies before, during or shortly after birth due to incompatibility with life. _Two_ , that the baby lives and has a life, however short, of various treatments, surgeries, pain and chronic debilitating illness." 

A Sophie's Choice. 

Their baby’s life is a _Sophie's Choice._

John could still recall watching that movie with his bandmates back when they were a family, watching as Sophie, a woman in the Holocaust played by Meryl Streep, was told she could only keep one of her two children.

One would live, the other would die.

And she would have to make the choice. 

She couldn't. She screamed and cried and begged. 

Until soldiers appeared to rip both her children out of her grasp and she lost it. Sophie screamed for them to take her daughter. To take her baby. 

Then she was forced to watch, sobbing soundlessly as her daughter was carried away screaming, crying for her. Knowing in her last moments that it was her brother whom her mother had chosen to save. But was that honestly the truth of the matter? Really?

John always did wonder what child Sophie was actually intending to save. 

Her son would be alive, going through the torture of a life in a death camp, right beside her. 

Her daughter would be dead and set free of any pain. 

So... what child had she actually saved?

John looks at the images of his son and cries silently, as Ronnie presses her trembling hands into her belly, cradling their unborn sickly son.

Ronnie is adamant, they are going to fight for their boy. That they are not giving up until their baby does. They are letting him call the shots. Their tiny baby boy is deciding if he lives or dies, it’s all up to him. _Where’s the guidebook for this?_ John wants to scream, to tear out his ridiculously permed hair in clumps. _What to do when someone tells you your unborn baby is sick._

_When someone tells you your unborn baby is going to die._

…

He is born on a day they choose. 

December 26th. Boxing Day.

When the streets are still lit up with Christmas decorations of every size, shape and color. 

Nearly a week overdue, but still pointedly smaller than most any other infant his gestational age. He is born by cesarean section for fear of any further damage being done by vaginal delivery. Within seconds of leaving Ronnie’s body, their precious baby boy is being rushed to the NICU. He is blue and swollen, and any pressure on the veiny skin makes his vitals spike dangerously, he doesn't cry and makes more of a sad muted little whistling noise between his pale pursed lips. He is cyanotic and unstable in nearly every sense of the word and it takes just about an hour to stabilize his fragile condition. 

It’s an hour before they see their baby, covered in wires and catheters, incubated and intubated, his first NG feeding tube down his nose, and a scheduled surgery in the morning. 

A surgery that ends up happening even earlier than expected, as an emergency procedure. 

He is just four hours old, when he has his first open-heart surgery.

John cries in the sterile bathroom where he thinks no one will see. He is appreciative of their hospital’s anonymity, as there is nothing shoved in his face for him to sign and no one cares about Queen. The band he treasured once is dead regardless.

The surgery type is so new that the doctor performing it has only done it three times.

Yet the baby comes away alive.

John is so out of it, that he only learns the name of the procedure through after-care instructions: _A Blalock-Taussig (BT) Shunt._ Where the surgeons had put an artificial tube in his child’s chest to bypass the shitty right side of his heart and funnel oxygen to his lungs.

The bassist leaves the hospital to research his son’s condition at the public library for the first time.

He cries into an old medical textbook that smells of mothballs and disuse, and wishes, not for the first time, that he had Roger beside him to explain terminology that he’s never had any business knowing. This isn’t an electrical circuit, it’s his child.

But he does recognize one word, it appears far more often than any other. _Terminal._

Terminal = Ends in death. The progression of life. The progression of disease. Death is always the end. 

It doesn’t matter what choices John makes, death will always come to take his baby away. 

It feels like he is sobbing for hours, days, weeks, his own heart being wrenched from his chest with a crowbar. _(Perhaps he could give it to his sleeping baby, who is laying there as still as death, covered in a sea of wires and gauze instead of a blanket)_. John already loves him. He’s loved his baby boy from the first kick, the first little nudge against his hand. The first positive test. The first missed period.

He’s loved his baby since back before the infant was little more than a concept. 

He loves his son so fucking much.

Their boy spends four months in the NICU, and the only times John or Ronnie can touch their son is when they have their treasured less than an hour of skin-to-skin contact a day.

They name him: _Farrokh Harold Meddows Deacon._

After the brothers he still loves, even after their veritable abandonment.

He gives his son Freddie’s given name.

He remembers asking the other man about its meaning once, remembers Freddie’s flippant: _“Oh, it’s a fairly common name where I’m from, Deaky darling! It means happy and fortunate.”_ Complete with a token Freddie smile.

 _Happy, fortunate,_ both attributes he wants for his son above all else.

So little _Farrokh Deacon_ it is.

Though the other kids take to calling their little brother _Sunshine_ and he allows it.

There’s very little happiness and sunshine in the hospital, but tiny Farrokh always brings a smile to John’s face.

His precious baby boy who defies all expectations, who doesn’t _die._

But unfortunately, the rest of the doctors' prophecies come true, one by one. 

And little Sunshine suffers a great deal. 

John learns how to clean chest drainage tubes, before changing his youngest son’s diapers, and how to place an NG tube, while his baby boy just cries and cries. 

His first steps are taken down a sterile hospital corridor, tethered by tubes and endless cords. And John cries. Sometimes it seems like all he does is cry.

All his dreams of fatherhood and his previous experiences, they couldn’t compare to this… he hadn't known the agony involved in holding down his sick child whilst he wailed.

He knows the language of spring colds and low-grade fevers, spoonfuls of Children’s Paracetamol and a day spent home from school. Not endless stop-gap surgeries and medications that could never fix the real root of the problem, a youngest child who is never well, who can look him in the eyes from such a painfully early age and scream about just how much he hates him. 

John watches his other children grow and his every dream of normalcy shatter along with them.

How dutiful little Robbie's eyes turn hard in the face of illness _(too early to be so cynical about the world, too early to understand death)_ , how Michael finds shelter in the words of others _(carrying books around like other children toted security blankets, those heavy tomes that remind John of college days and Brian Mays)_ and how little Lo's reality will forever be shaped by her youngest brother's failing health _(they're still just babies themselves, none of them will ever be able to escape the truth)._

That their Sunshine will leave a mark on all of them.

With indelible ink. 

When John’s no-longer-youngest is three years old, Joshua having been born a few months previously, Ronnie presses a marker and a piece of faded pink construction paper into his pudgy little hands. A distraction she often needs (and uses) herself. 

"Farrokh, make a little line like this," She quickly demonstrates how to make a tally mark. "...every time you make someone smile." 

"Why Mommy? We play a game?" 

He asks so innocently. John’s own green eyes look up and out at him from their son's face. Whorls of obnoxious red hair stick out in stubborn tufts from his head.

“No, baby. Do you know how you like to draw pictures?" He nods slowly. "Well, this is a bit like that. It's sort of like drawing a picture in your head, of all the people you've touched." 

A small hand, bandaged with thick beige gauze and a bulky IV set reaches out then, to rub over the soft skin of her cheek. "I touch you Mommy!" He chirps so brightly with his small bubblegum pink grin. It makes John want to breakdown again then and there. 

"Yes angel, but not _there."_

Ronnie moves his tiny hand until it’s resting directly over her heart. _"Here."_

"This is where you should always touch people." Their boy nods solemnly, almost as if he understands with a deeper frame of reference than they ever will. "Remember Farrokh, people are the most beautiful canvases to make a mark on." 

Of course John’s fragile son would be an artist. _(He worries just how much Freddie he gave his son through that name… would little Farrokh leave him as well?)_

Every raw emotion their baby feels, goes into his paintings, his sketches, his watercolors. _(He likes those the most, because he says it’s like the colors are dancing across the page)._ John loves him so much.

John loves all his children equally, no matter how many doors his oldest slams, or how often his second oldest screams the contrary when John has to take Farrokh into hospital yet again. 

But there is something very special about his second youngest, more than just his poor health. Sometimes it seems like the little boy is made out of their hopes and dreams. The boy who was never meant to be. 

It’s during his son’s fourth open-heart surgery that he gets the call from Miami.

He’s gone home to get a blanket and some pajamas, as it seems they’ll be living in hospital for quite a while yet. Suddenly, after months, years of no contact, Miami is talking a mile a minute about plans and concerts and how Freddie is calling a meeting. _Freddie_. The same Freddie who has been gone for more than three years. The same Freddie who left them, but wants to sidle back into John’s life like he’d never left it at all.

“Can you come?” Is what Miami asks him.

 _My son is lying on an operating table right now as surgeons stop his tiny broken heart and connect the pulmonary artery and the inferior vena cava, stopping the blood from mixing in his damaged little heart. They are going to leave a little hole called a fenestration, between the chambers to allow a little bit of the blood to pass through._ Is what he wants to scream.

_Fuck Freddie. Fuck Queen. Fuck it all!_

_My son could be dead right now for all I know._

_I’m watching my wife die a little bit more inside, every time we have to hand our toddler over to masked doctors, so that they can cut him open and break his sternum to reveal the damaged heart I gave him. ....You know nothing of my life._

What he says is: “Okay.”

His Farrokh comes out of surgery with an even longer and deeper scar on his chest. His tiny son’s lips are parted and his mouth opened, to allow the enormous intubation set to stick out, connected to the ventilator breathing for him.

John cries into his son’s red hair that night, wondering why of all his children, Sunshine was the one to get the red. And he wonders how many times his own heart can be shattered into pieces by the same person.

….

Then he obediently sits in Miami’s office like a lost child.  
  
He should be in hospital, where his second youngest is just starting to wake up from his recovery stupor the day before and becoming more aware of the world again. Who is probably wondering where his Daddy is.

Instead, John is in Miami’s office like a dog waiting to be thrown a bone.

He’s sitting between Brian and Roger who look exactly the same, while he feels like he’s aged a thousand bloody years in just three and a half.

Freddie is a few feet away and looks tired.

His face has more frown-lines than John remembers, but he is still Freddie and John’s own heart aches because of it.

A part of him will always be that nineteen-year-old boy, who didn’t know how to be a rockstar and latched onto the older man as both a guardian and a mentor, long before he was a friend. Part of him wants to run up and hide in Freddie’s arms again, burying his ancient face in that chest and explaining all his woes, anchoring himself to a different life. Pretending to be naive and young again, like he was still that boy who'd sat on a unassuming couch and gotten his heart torn out of his chest for all his efforts.

John wonders if that was _why,_ fate’s way of punishing him, he’d fathered a child with a broken heart in his own chest, and had caused his son to born the same way, a reflection of his own sins. He should have _known_ when Freddie needed him.

The young Freddie who would have taken him by the hand and comforted him in the way he so desperately needed.

The new Freddie who wasn’t there when John needed him.

But perhaps it was deserved, he hadn’t seen how awful Freddie was feeling back then, hadn’t seen how the other man had so desperately needed _him._

“So who wants to go first?” Miami asks, looking around with apprehension, as if expecting those bladed weapons to be out on full-display.

“I’ll start.” Of course it’s Freddie, John sees the way Brian looks down slightly, the unconscious tensing of Roger’s shoulders.

“I’ve been hideous, I know that and I deserve your fury. I’ve been conceited, selfish… well an arsehole basically.” John has to stifle a smile, but he doesn't know why. Maybe it’s because Freddie is in front of them again, Freddie is alive and Freddie’s voice is like a balm for his soul, always has been, he wants to cling to the man in front of him so badly and yet, his body is more turned towards the door.

Nervous, thinking about his family, his second youngest, what if his boy’s taken another bad turn?

Instantly he wants to snatch up the receiver on Miami’s desk and frantically dial the phone in Farrokh’s room, if only to hear his baby coo.

“Strong beginning,” Rog gripes, but John can see the softening of his eyes. Roger has always been a sucker for Freddie, a sucker for all of them to be honest. Or at least, he used to be. John had tried dialing up the boys at one time or another, usually during the worst bit of his son’s fight, only to catch a dial tone or a snapped, _“Sorry John, busy, talk later yeah?”_ Before John could so much as get a word out.

They never used to call him _John._

And his heart aches every time at the realization.

When had he stopped being _Deaky?_ Had _Deaky_ died with Queen?

Freddie opens and closes his mouth like a fish gasping for air before his attitude returns full force. “Look I’m happy to strip off my clothes and flagellate myself before you… Or rather, I could ask you a simple question?”

John is picking at a bandaid on his thumb, a cartoon character patterned plaster, Lo had pressed it to his finger when she saw the paper cut that he had missed. His little girl who wasn't sick, but who had still spent the better part of her life in hospital. She who had seen hell from his arms.

Like the time Farrokh had stopped breathing.

She was four. He was three.

He’d gotten an infection in his port-a-cath, a permanent IV implanted in his chest, because he may have been just a toddler, but his tiny veins were irreparably shot to hell like any IV drug user’s.

It had been such a good night at first, until the little redhead, with a scar that looked as though they'd tried to cut him in half, suddenly stopped breathing.  
His desperate lungs were floundering, crippled by a broken heart that couldn’t provide them with what they needed to function, so they gave up, they just couldn't take the strain of the new massive infection.

Lo had been sitting on the bed, they were dozing together, she was holding her little brother's sweaty hand one minute, completely uninterested, wondering when they would finally get to go home because the hospital smelled weird and the food tasted funny.

When suddenly, Farrokh’s bright green eyes had rolled back into his head like a scene from _The Exorcist_ and every machine started flashing and beeping and screaming.

John had swept up his daughter into his arms with wide horrified eyes, and backed up so far that his butt touched the wall, his hands were trembling.

" _Code Blue-Pedi, Code Blue-Pedi!"_

The intercom had screamed.  

Nurses, techs and doctors swarmed in, crash cart at the ready. At just three years old, Farrokh was small enough to warrant one-handed CPR by a large male nurse who shouldered his way in. They cut open his fuzzy snowflake pajamas, his favorite pair, even though there were clearly buttons down the front, and they stuck AED patches to his pale freckled chest as they forcibly shoved a tube down his throat.

Lo was four years old and she didn't scream. She hyperventilated instead. 

She didn't start crying until John took her out of the room. 

Just as Farrokh stiffened and electricity coursed through his tiny body to save his scrambling heart, the muscle dying like any other without oxygen. But Lo didn't know that then. How Sunshine’s little lungs were always taking a beating, from the surgeries and drugs, from the strain caused by his messed up heart.

Lo just screamed and cried, demanding little fingers ripping at John’s unwashed hair and clothes, desperate to get back to Sunshine.

Ronnie and the rest of the kids had gone down to the cafeteria for a late dinner, and he’d hoped that they wouldn’t come back up for ages, one screaming child and one coding in front of him, was already more than he could handle.

“Laura, Lo, sweetheart, you need to calm down." 

John had fallen to his knees and was carding his hands through her forever disheveled hair. She was crying so hard that she was hiccuping and coughing all at the same time. 

 _“Sunshine! Sunshine!”_ She'd wailed through her tears, little clenched fists pummeling John’s soft chest in leu of the disease she couldn't fight for her brother. 

“Lo, honey, breathe.” John’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. 

"He wanted me to hold his hand, Daddy.” She finally sobbed into his neck, latching onto him with everything she had. "I have to hold his hand!"

John couldn't physically cry anymore. But he couldn't exactly hold it back either, it had felt like his soul was being torn in two.

"Laura, Sunshine’s very sick right now, okay?" John had scrubbed his face so hard that the motion could bring tears all its own. "He might not get better, and even if he does... He's not going to be _well_ , he's not going to be…” _Ordinary_. Lo just stopped. Stopped crying. Stopped screaming. Stopped blinking away the tears that dripped onto the cold linoleum. 

“ _Why, Daddy?_ ”

She asked him then and he had no answer for her.

Because Daddy was the one who fixed all her toys and protected her and her brothers from the worst parts of the world.

Because he was a superhero in his daughter’s eyes and yet, he couldn’t even save her baby brother.

…

“What’s it going to take for you all to forgive me?” Freddie asks and John lets go of the bandaid before he starts crying.

Brian shakes his massive curly head then, ever the diplomat. “Is that what you want, Freddie? I’ll forgive you? Is that it, can we go now?”

John won’t.

He can’t forgive any of them.

“No.” Freddie looks so desperate that John almost feels bad for thinking something so callous. Then he remembers all he’s gone through in these three years apart and he knows his truth. “I went to Munich, I hired a bunch of guys, I told them exactly what I wanted them to do and the problem was… they _did it._ No pushback from Roger, none of your rewrites, none of his _funny looks_.” Oh. So John is relegated to _funny looks_ now. That’s rich.

“….I need you, and you need me.” John swallows and it feels like pure acid coating his throat because yes, he needed Freddie, needed him through a dozen sleepless nights and boxes of tissues and bouts of screaming at God. Needed Roger. Needed Brian. And got no one in return. “Let’s face it, we’re not too bad for four aging Queens! So um… Go ahead, name your terms. What will it take for us to be a _family_ again?”

Before Roger or Brian can open their mouths, John starts to laugh, harsh rolling laughs that wrack his insides, as if being inside a blender.

“A _family?_ That’s rich coming from you! Families are meant to be there for one another, yeah?” They look at him like he’s grown a second head, quiet John monopolizing the conversation for once. “Well, _I_ needed you! I needed all of you!” His voice cracks like a dropped mug, shattering into bits. “I needed you when my son stopped breathing! I needed you when they told Ronnie and I that he would die before he turned one, that he’d be lucky to last the first night. I needed you when they took him for four different open-heart surgeries! When they took my newborn and cut open his chest to remove his sternum and stop his tiny heart in order to tear into it! I needed you when I was told countless times that I would _bury my child!”_ He’s barely breathing himself, shaking from head to toe with fists clenching dangerously.

His ridiculously permed hair is falling in his eyes and manages to blessedly obscure the tears that coat his cheeks as they fall.

He doesn't care that he’s weeping like a baby in front of his once family, or that three years of mock-strength are sapping what’s left of _John Deacon_ out of his body. How every time his son struggles he’s reminded that it’s all his fault.

And he thinks all of a sudden, of the song he scrawled on colored construction paper in a neutropenic playroom.

“ _Where were you, when everything was falling apart._  
_All my days were spent by the telephone that never rang_  
_And all I needed was a call that never came_  
_To the corner of 1st and Amistad…”_

On the corner between Heaven and Hell, waiting for someone to drag him home again.

The wail that tears from his lips feel like the greatest release of his life, collapsing into his own hands, sobbing like it’s the only reason he’s alive.

Of all the things he expects next, for himself to charge out of that room, Queen left in shards at his feet… he feels a pair of familiar arms wrap around him, a fluffy messy of uncombed blonde hair obscuring his vision. Roger is holding him for all he is worth, cradling John like he’s still that scared boy playing in a real band for the first time, experiencing _that life_ for the first time.

He cries into Roger _(“Rog…” He whimpers and the other man sways them back and forth slightly, “I’m here, Deaky, I’m here.”)_ for what feels like a million years, the crying only intensifying as Freddie and Brian, even Miami, join in the embrace. Their love, their touch is the thing that breaks him, the thing that lets him reform into someone, something greater than how he started.

All he knows that he can breathe for the first time in years.

“I’m so _sorry,_ Deaky.” Rog breathes into his hair and Brian starts to stroke it. Freddie is crying, he feels the wetness spreading across his spine.

John won’t let go.

John won’t let them go again.

He won’t lose them.

He refuses.

  
-X-

  
_“Early morning_  
_City breaks_

 _I've been calling_  
_For years and years and years and years_  
_And you never left me no messages_  
_You never send me no letters_  
_You got some kind of nerve_  
_Taking all I want…”_

  
-X-

  
They meet Farrokh that night.

John turns the corner and half expects to see his son laying in a bed designed for someone much bigger. Red hair damp with sweat and pushed aside, his body covered in bandages and his tiny scarred chest heaving. A little boy with a tube shoved through his skin and broken ribs and a tube taped to the side of his mouth, where it tunnels away into obscurity, IVs attached to the bumpy port in his chest, and stripped down to little more than his pajama pants.

Instead, he is overjoyed to see his three-year-old awake and alert, sitting up and coloring on a bedside table, a tiny care-bear pull-up on his bum and enormous swatch of bandage trailing down his chest to cover the newly repaired incision. True, he’s wearing a suit of countless wires and tubes, but he’s awake, he’s laughing and when he sees John, he stands up in bed and screams, “Daddy!” At the top of his tired little lungs, hands outstretched, wobbling slightly.

John lets out a delighted shout and all but hurtles over to gently tug his boy into his arms.

And remembers a shopping trip with his family earlier that month.

When little Sunshine got in trouble at the grocery, for taking a pack of kids' band-aids from the medical supply isle and covering a few bananas with them. John just couldn’t stop laughing _‘Sunshine, why would you do that, honey?'_ Ronnie had asked and Farrokh had just looked at John in childish confusion with his sunshine smile. _'You said they was bruised, Daddy! I make them all better!'_

Ronnie is dozing in a chair by the window, the other children left at home with yet another babysitter.

So John turns back to Freddie, Brian, Roger and Miami with his little boy snuggled up in his arms.

“Guys, this is _Farrokh Harold Meddows Deacon._ Sunshine, these are your Uncles Freddie, Brian, Roger and Miami.” The little boy in his arms, waves and even blows a clumsy kiss.

“Hi!” He squeals and those chubby arms instantly extend towards Freddie, who is closest.

Their frontman stiffens, but does raise his hands obediently and even comes to sit on the bed so that Farrokh can crawl all over him. The tiny boy reaches out to touch Freddie’s mustache reverently. “Hi Unca’ Freddie.” Kissing the corner of his mouth.

The man looks like he is about to melt into a puddle of goo where he sits, holding the boy like he’s made of pure porcelain. “Hello _Farrokh.”_ His voice trembles on the flawless pronunciation of the name and John can see the tears in his eyes as he says it. “You’re a lovely little lad, aren’t you? Good for your Mummy and Daddy?”

The tiny boy shakes his head. “I’m a bad boy… _I make Daddy cry lots and lots.”_ The last part is whispered loudly into Freddie’s ear like it’s a secret and John has to turn away to hide the suddenly stricken look on his face. He covers his mouth with one hand and breathes in deeply to center himself. He almost misses the way that Roger comes to sit beside Freddie, bending over to press an achingly featherlight kiss into his nephew’s hair.

“Don’t worry, mate. We’ll look after your Dad, I promise.”

Which nearly sets John off again, and leaves him breathing harshly and pulled into Brian’s narrow chest. “We’ve got you, Deaky. We’ve got you.” _I’m so sorry._

Roger’s thumb catches on the top of the bandage that adorns the tiny boy’s chest and he takes a breath, forcing a smile. “And we’ll look after you as well.”

That is enough for the toddler who foists himself on Roger next, burying his head into the partially exposed chest.

“I love you, Unca’ Rog.”

Then it’s the blonde’s turn to look away and cry. “Love you too, kid.”

Miami drapes a spare blanket over Ronnie’s still sleeping form, so exhausted that nothing can wake her up but the sound of her sick child’s distress.

Everything may not have been okay, but John wasn’t alone. He and Ronnie weren't alone, no longer watching over their boy like a lone pair of sentries. Their family had arrived.

Did he know how long his son would live? No, he didn’t. Did he know how long Queen would survive in the minds and hearts of their fans? No, he didn’t.

But for the moment, his son is happy and held tightly in Roger’s arms.

Surrounded by their family, John bends to press a kiss to Ronnie’s forehead.

_We’re going to be alright, my love. Everything is going to be alright._

Both Queen and John’s second youngest child live through that night.

And many thereafter.

  
-X-

  
_“Lost and insecure_  
_You found me, you found me_  
_Lying on the floor_  
_Surrounded, surrounded_  
_Why'd you have to wait?_  
_Where were you, where were you?_

 _Just a little late_  
_You found me, you found me…”_

  
_-_ X-

 


	2. And my clothes don't fit me no more...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A couple more snippets in the life of our boy! Age wise they are: 17(nearly 18), 16, 15, 15, 15, 9, (Introspective John). So counting backwards! :D 
> 
> Features: Streets of Philadelphia by Bruce Springsteen for chapter title, You're my Best-Friend by John Deacon and If I Die Young by The Band Perry. And the final quote is by William Blake. 
> 
>  
> 
> HAPPY FEBRUARY GUYS!!!
> 
> Here's a link to PCHA! Be looking out for events where you live! http://conqueringchd.org
> 
> And if necessary, look for similar associations where you live! <33333 :D We can all make a difference!

_“If I die young bury me in satin_  
_Lay me down on a bed of roses_  
_Sink me in the river at dawn_  
_Send me away with the words of a love song.”_

  
_You can't save him._

_You can't change this._

_You can't be unaffected._

_You can't say 'I love you' anymore._

_You can't say goodbye either._

_You can't do anything._

  
_You can't save your brother's life._

  
Growing up as Farrokh Deacon’s big sister is a bit like being being in a dead-sprint during a race.

Being so far ahead of the pack, so close to the finish line.

When your brother suddenly falls and just can't get up. You have only a split second to make a lasting choice. Do you keep running? Do you stop and help? Even if stopping and helping means that you get trampled by the horde that's coming? When you know that if you don't help, he'll get trampled regardless. Do you take that risk? Do you drown with him? Risk it all? Or do you let him go? In that split second, can you really weigh the options? Can you really make that choice?

Being his big sister is like being faced with that choice. Over and over and over again, every single day of your life. Terrified of what each choice would mean. And likewise terrified of the alternative. 

Lo tries dozens of ways of hiding from the truth as a small child. 

She covers her face with fleece blankets in a pillow fort that they'd built together.

She pretends Farrokh is off on a Safari in Africa during the longest hospital stays or that she is about to get a postcard that he has written her from the Eiffel Tower. Pretending is how she got through it. Pretending and jealousy and naively ignoring what’s right in front of her. Because the truth just hurt too much. 

Everything she did was wrong. 

Sometimes it feels like being Tom on _Tom and Jerry_ , waiting for an anvil to fall on her head, or a dehydrated man surrounded by nothing but undrinkable seawater. And there is nothing for her to do about it.

She is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, to get kicked while she’s down. Being the sister of a chronically ill little brother taught her how to love, how to be afraid, how to never say goodbye and how to expect the worst from everything and everyone. To always expect good things to fall through her fingers like sand in an hourglass. 

But being Farrokh’s sister in particular, feels like tripping over air, free-falling until freckled fingers catch her in midair. 

 _Don't worry, Lo..._ Sunshine would lift her up again and press a gentle kiss to her cheek. _I've got you now._

 _I've always got you_.

The morning before, she’d woken up to use the bathroom, one of the last to do so, given the cacophony of sounds downstairs.

And saw the artificial light oozing out from under the door.

Yet the only thing she could hear inside was a strange thrashing sound, loud and juxtaposed against everything else. Her first response had been: ew, gross, one of her brothers was probably jacking off or something.

But when said brother didn't answer to the jeers or kicks to the door, that was when a cold chill crept down her body. Freezing her to the core. 

She pushed her way in, peering around the frame tentatively, only to see her seventeen-year-old brother Farrokh, lying as stiff as a board on the tile, saliva frothing in foamy bubbles at his lips and bright green eyes rolled back so far into his head that she could see the criss-crossing veins there. His bare narrow chest was jerking up and down, up and down, like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.

Now she and her siblings, had spent the better part of their lives seeing the after effects of Sunshine’s congenital heart deformity and its treatment, they had seen the handfuls of pills that he took every day without complaint, the numerous times when he'd push himself too hard and his lips would turn grayish-blue, or when he would cough endlessly like a cystic fibrosis patient. 

Common illnesses can still turn deadly for her brother and so often put too much strain on his vital organs, so he’s often hospitalized until those clear up.

He’s still sick. He hasn’t had a major open-heart surgery since he was six, but he’s still sick.

So fucking sick.

Sick in a way that is never going to get any better. Proof that all his attempts to be athletic, active and do a million things at once, are just delaying the inevitable. Or maybe even hastening it. 

“Sunshine! Sunshine! _Shit!”_ Her brother was wholly unresponsive to repeated calls of his name and Lo’s first thoughts were, one: that he's having a seizure and/or two: that he's choking. 

She desperately scrambled over there, knees on the hard tile, frantically running her hands over her baby brother's pigeon hole chest, the puckered scar separating both halves, not sure whether she needed to start compressions or what.

She just settled for tilting up her brother's chin and using two fingers to scoop out any foamy mess or vomit, just in case the younger was aspirating it. 

Then she forced the bony boy into the recovery position, knees bent, laying on his side. The teen was still vacant and jerking out of his control, seizure or no seizure, empty eyes wide. She was so terrified that she couldn't breathe either.

" _Dad!_ Something's wrong with Sunshine! Robbie! Michael! Josh! Mum! _Dad!"_

Either her sobbed wails were really as shrill as they sounded to her own ears or their house was really that small, because their Dad hurtled into that room like a speeding bullet. Like the Devil himself was on his tail. He barely spared her a glance, his eyes were only for his ill son, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

"Lo, call 999! I think he's having a seizure! Or he can't breathe! I don't know! I just _don't know!"_

What they did know, was that Farrokh was _sweaty_. A few whorls of downy red hair were stuck to his damp freckled forehead with all the sticky sweat. She brushed them away with a surprisingly steady hand.

Her Dad, with his short hair and strong muscles from the pure adrenaline, carried her older brother out of that room and into their living room/kitchen area, so that the paramedics and EMTs could swarm his reedy body like a horde of angry wasps. 

Lo hyperventilated into her hands in the hallway, knees pulled up to her chest, trying to avert the panic attack before she followed.

While John carried his stiffened and then worryingly limp teenage son out of that room, his baby boy who was nearly eighteen but still as skinny as could be, with wrinkled Peter Rabbit pajamas that looked like Beatrix Potter’s ink drawings and an old sock pushed halfway down his foot. Somehow that was the only thing that John noticed. As the techs tore open that warm pajamas top and stuck AED patches onto the scarred heaving chest.

Lo rushed in there like an idiot, fluffy brown hair falling into her watery eyes. Useless. Completely and utterly useless. 

She couldn't even comfort her baby brothers Luke and Cam who all looked as if they thought Farrokh was bloody dead on the floor. Or their Mum, who was standing there with warm fat tears rolling down her cheeks, trembling as she covered up her mouth with both hands. Sunshine would've gone over there and wrapped his pipe-cleaner arms around her. Telling her that everything was going to be okay. 

But Lo wasn’t her brother.

Somehow, at that moment, sitting there and watching them cardiovert her best-friend and then start these violent compressions that made the frightfully skinny boy practically bounce on the stretcher, not being like _him_ felt like her worst failing in the world. 

"Laura!" She didn't even realize how her Dad was shaking her, practically dragging her to the door single-handedly. "Lo! Baby, we have to go! We have to go now!" 

They both raced after that gurney, piling into the ambulance like a clown-car. Lo only had eyes for Farrokh, watching as they intubated him and manually breathed for him, with the aid of a plastic blue bag attached to the long tube that funneled down his throat.

Their Dad rattled off the little redhead's expansive medical history while Laura just existed, holding onto her brother's calloused hand like somehow she alone could anchor her little brother’s flighty soul to his body. _Don't leave me, please don't leave me. I swear I'll always split my time with the car and won't even care if you leave your muddy trackie bottoms on my bed. Please just wake up. Sunshine, open up your eyes. Please. I can't lose you. Dad can’t lose you. Mum can’t lose you. The Uncles and cousins can’t lose you. Robbie, Michael, Josh, Luke and Cam can't lose you. Carter and Bertie need you. Just wake up. I'll do anything if you just wake up_. 

Farrokh didn't wake up. 

He just _coded._

She watched as the early December snow fell outside the ambulance's back windows as her brother's heart arrested. And the EMTs tried frantically to bring him back. Slamming down on his chest so hard that she pretended the crunching noise she heard was the sound of tires on ice, and not Sunshine’s matchstick ribs breaking. She couldn't look. She just held on tight. 

 _Don't worry, Lo. Just hold on to me_. She imagined Farrokh coaching her, softly. _Just close your eyes and it’ll all be okay._

 _“Oh, you're the best friend that I ever had_  
_I've been with you such a long time_  
_You're my sunshine and I want you to know_  
_That my feelings are true_  
_I really love you…”_

"Push the epi and bag him, he's still in A-Fib with RVR. Crashed twice. There's something wrong with this kid's heart!" 

_Yeah, they knew that bit._

"Myocarditis," The doctor told them in the ER. "...likely bacterial in origin but possibly viral." She sighed, slumping into a seat beside them. Looking all too human. 

“The muscular layer around his heart is inflamed. It's likely that a common routine illness saw the weakness there and took advantage. When the heart is inflamed, defects or not, it can't pump correctly which caused Farrokh’s arrhythmia, an irregular heart rhythm. One of those was Atrial Fibrillation with Rapid Ventricular Response. But guessing from how he presented in the ER, I'm assuming there have been others." She looked exhausted, gnawing on her bottom lip. "We're starting him on broad spectrum antibiotics and anything we can to take the strain off his weak heart and lungs." 

Her brother draws comics of a superhero he calls _Super Zipper_ , a hero with a long scar and second bellybutton notch on his chest like Farrokh’s own. He started a foundation for kids afflicted with congenital heart defects like his own. Their father started a band as a teenager, her baby brother is starting a revolution in neonatal and cardiac defect care.

She is so proud.

"But given his history of cardiac arrests and congenital damage, I don't want to risk another bout. His heart is simply too fragile right now and his lungs will start overtaxing themselves to accomplish just simple oxygenation of tissues. Ordinarily I would just put him on a ventilator to give his lungs a rest, but I can't risk that either. Artificial ventilation, especially as high as Farrokh needs it dialed up right now, can add scar tissue and stiffening and that's the very last thing I want to happen. His powerful lungs are the reason he’s still alive.” Powerful lungs? As a baby he hadn’t even been able to cry.

She’s still singing to herself under her breath, eyes closed to block out the world.

 _“Ooh, I've been wandering 'round_  
_But I still come back to you_  
_In rain or shine_  
_You've stood by me girl_  
_I'm happy at home_  
_You're my best friend…_ ”

"I think Farrokh should be on a VA-ECMO up in the CICU. It's a machine that can do the work of his heart and lungs for him. It'll hook up to a cannula in his neck and there will be at least one response team member in the room at all times to monitor everything." More machines, and another death watch.

“It’s new but… He should be on the ECMO until the inflammation goes down and his lungs can pick up the slack again. If the inflammation goes down.” _His heart could be even more damaged by this._

And the real kicker.

“He needs to be put on the _heart transplant list_ , John. I’m so sorry.”

Lo holds her brother’s hand while he sleeps, the ECMO machine is a bit like a dialysis machine, and her sunshine baby brother just lays there in a milky-hazy daze for long two weeks, as it does the work of his damaged heart and battered lungs for him.

He is in the hospital for three more weeks after that just to recuperate.

Bringing home a black pager with a simple rule.

They are only to be paged once a new heart is acquired.

She holds it together for the three additional weeks it takes for her brother to be at home once more, carried inside by her doting Uncle Brian, who doesn’t even grunt at the meager weight. Her baby brother is a _waif_ with red hair and green eyes. Once her brother is on the couch, he is smiling, joking and laughing as usual, like that fucking pager isn’t sitting right there in his lap.

She falls to pieces.

Starts sobbing like a baby, right then and there. Sounding so broken and devastated that a worried Farrokh even tries to get up and go to her. _(She screams him back down again, don't you worry)._ Then she climbs up there and latches on. Holding him like ballast and doing her best to avoid the bandaids covering the sore spots where colored electrodes once pockmarked his skin like spots on a Dalmatian. 

"I love you, Lo." He whispers into her unbound curls of fluffy brown hair. 

"I hate you so much!" She practically howls, tears making her round face salty and sticky.  

He kisses her on the forehead. 

"I love you too." 

  
-X-

  
“ _Lord make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother_  
_She'll know I'm safe with you when_  
_She stands under my colours, oh and_  
_Life ain't always what you think it oughta be, no_

_Ain't even grey, but she buries her baby_

_The sharp knife of a short life,_  
_Well, I've had just enough time_ …”

  
-X-

  
John thinks it’s Sunshine’s fault that Freddie is still with them.

Something about his middle boy and his best friend are almost equivocally tied together. More than just their names or their struggles with illness or the passions they share.

Freddie should have died when the AIDS took hold of his body, ravaging it from the inside out.

Farrokh should never have survived outside the womb, as many children like him spontaneously miscarry, because they are incompatible with life.

Somehow the two of them live on. A stubborn little boy who would not let his uncle leave him. A stubborn man who would not let his nephew go. Anchoring each other and refusing to let go of life. John counts himself lucky that he gets to keep them both each day.

He looks over at his teenage son and Freddie giving hell to Brian for ordering a vegetarian pizza, his son’s tongue is lolling out of his mouth and John can’t help but roll his eyes. Sipping his beer tamely as he sighs: “ _Farrokh_ , is that a new piercing?”

John’s little piece of happiness looks up from the mess on his plate, slice of pepperoni pizza halfway up to his mouth and just blinks at him, utterly confused.

That was, until John motions towards his own left nostril, and Sunshine’s green eyes brighten up considerably with the latent recollection of the delicate little silver hoop punched through the corner of his. A shit-eating grin twitches rebelliously to life on his lips and the crust falls forgotten into the plate. "Do you like it?" Broaching no real opinion with the tone of his voice. The little shit has already made up his mind about keeping it and nothing John says will ever change that.

"It's beautiful, _Sonshine_." John takes another long swig of his pint. And watches as the little vein in his son's forehead twitches in disappointment, clearly the boy has been bucking for yet another family feud. "Just like you." 

Loud and realistic mock-vomiting noises are all the response the older man receives for that particular brand of bullshit. But that isn’t really a surprise by this point, more of a given. 

"You're _gross_.”

“Only to you, love.”

Farrokh blows him a little kiss anyway.

It doesn’t matter how big his boy gets, how squirmy or sullen or full of teenage misplaced angst. Sunshine would always throw himself into the same thin spindly arms that John used to despise, until they had cradled his children.

And John would card his long nimble fingers through that head of stubborn red hair and pretend to not see the tracheotomy scars on his baby boy's neck, the long silvery scars that crisis-crossed his chest and belly, swirling faded memories of chest tubes, drainage tubes, feeding tubes and so much more. But he could never stop his index finger from reaching out and caressing the long red puckered scar that sloped down lower and longer than any other, peeking over the neckline of whatever Farrokh happened to wear that day, stopping at the little notch below it, what they liked to call his second belly-button.

"How's the heart?" 

A familiar censored smile beams on his son’s lips. "Still beating." The same answer his son has given him since the day he'd learned how to speak. A way to answer truthfully, without betraying any sort of pain or discomfort. 

Because in the deepest darkest parts of a broken heart, Sunshine is still a little con-artist, who just happens to use his nefarious powers for good. 

He’s still dressed in his Prussian-blue school uniform, pressed white tie and dress socks bunching up around his ankles. The school bag on his shoulder is practically bursting open with papers and busted notebooks, his piercings and thick eyeliner were both against school regulations but most people made exceptions for Sunshine. He was different. Always had been.

Farrokh’s smile is there, in the fractals of sunlight that break through on a cloudy day. His laugh is there in the wild urban dandelions, stubborn little fuckers that sprout through cracks in the busy sidewalks when you least expect them. And he is John’s whole world in a single phrase. 

But Joshua is shifting around nervously in his seat and John raises an eyebrow. “Josh, you alright?” The younger teen nods, but he still looks uncomfortable, a vivid red flush across his cheeks.

"Uh, yeah. I'm fine. It's just... is everyone _staring_ at us?" 

That seems to pique the interest of everyone else sitting at the table and John furrows his eyebrows. _What?_ No one is staring at them.

Until he realizes that Joshua doesn’t mean their family, he means the other patrons. Not that there were many of them of course. 

Just a couple of fellow parents with some rowdy kids, a goth couple with more piercings between them than holes in a block of Swiss cheese, the long-suffering workers of the establishment itself, and an elderly man with a flashy cane that looks like something Roger would own.

A real stellar audience right there. 

But they definitely are gawking. 

The kids are doing it unabashedly, but that isn’t out of the ordinary. It is just what kids do. The old man is pointedly not looking, and the couple are doing this tag-team maneuver where one looks while the other looks away and vice-versa. The workers are both looking and whispering to one another at the same time, and one of them seemed to be snapping a pic all secretly, with his camera positioned strategically behind a jar of Parmesan cheese.

Paps. A Queen thing no doubt. John smothers a sigh, waiting for the autograph hounds to descend, Brian, Rog and Fred all seem to realize and share the sentiment, incognito as they are. It’s probably Bri’s enormous hair cloud that gives them away, as no hats or tight ponytails can truly disguise that monstrosity.

_"Mommy what's wrong with that boy?"_

Oh.

 _Oh._  

John watches the smile melt off of his middle son’s face. Sunshine had slipped off his school blazer and unbuttoned his white dress shirt, attempting to mock Rog in his earlier years, revealing the long puckered scar, the second belly-button and the rest of the scars that litter his chest, his battle scars. There is a Hickman catheter spiraling out of the corner, just below his collarbone. A three-pronged plastic tube covered in clear protective gauze and orange smiley-face tape, it’s where a few of his medications are given intravenously.

The mother of the child in question, looks like she is going to die right on the spot. Especially when Farrokh turns around in his seat to look back with curiosity. But the kid, a little girl with ladybug rain-boots and a candycane pinstriped cotton dress, isn't done yet. 

“How come you have a straw sticking out of there? Would it hurt if I pulled on it? Where does it _go?"_

Most of these rapid-fire questions are directed at Farrokh himself and John guesses that the girl is around six. Old enough to express herself but not old enough to do it with tact. 

He sees Rog bristle and stand in the corner of his eye, fists white knuckled and clenched like he’s going to do _what? Punch a six-year-old?_ John would be lying if he said the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. It doesn’t matter how much older his son is, in his mind, Sunshine is still a baby who needs protecting.

But as if anticipating the bloodshed, Farrokh is already on his feet and striding towards them both.

He gets on his knees, till he and the girl are staring eye to eye. "Actually, it goes into my heart. It's sort of like a crazy straw that goes all the way inside. So pulling on it would _definitely hurt_. This tube," He tugged on it lightly to demonstrate. “Is how I get my medicine.”

She forms a little heart with her hands and presses it to her own chest, he gently moves it into the correct position. “Right there, _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum_.” He makes the sound effects and she giggles in delight, mimicking the same sounds with her mouth and squeezing her hands in and out like the play heart is beating.

“What’s _that?”_ She pokes at the big scar and he just smiles.

She isn't afraid to point out what she doesn't understand.

“When I was a baby, a doctor cut me open and fixed my heart.”

She crinkles her nose. “What was wrong with it?”

He forms a heart with his hands again and takes away half. “I only had this much of a heart, so the doctor fixed it so I had both.” Back together again. Not really accurate, but close enough.

“Oh.” She nods like she understands him and he tugs off one of his red CHD awareness bands from his wrist and offers it to her, she quickly slides it on.

"We match!" She squeals in excitement and he’s happily bopping his head along in agreement. 

“I'm Missy." 

“Nice to meet you Miss Missy, I’m _Sunshine_.” Sticking out his tongue and making a funny face. She makes one right back and giggles.

And just before her frantic mother pulls her away to leave, she flings her arms around him in a loose little hug. "Bye!" She chirps, happy as a bird. “I’m glad your heart got fixed, Sunshine!”

Farrokh locks eyes with her mother as they’re leaving and John sends an unspoken prayer her way. _Please don't teach your child to be scared of people like my son. People who are different. Let her ask questions, let her learn and be inclusive. Don't stifle that curiosity just because it seems rude. What's rude is to look and say nothing or look away, as if he’s something to be feared or repulsed by. He’s just a kid. If your six-year-old can see him as a human being, why can't you?_

Of course, John couldn't say it out loud. He couldn't lecture someone else on how to raise their child. He could just hope and pray that they made the right decisions in the end. Sometimes people just didn’t know what to say or what to do.

And sometimes you can't do anything to change that. 

Once Missy and her mother were gone, Farrokh flipped back around to look at the rest of his family with a little bow and John is reminded of the fact that his son does this every week. When he visits kids and families in the hospital dressed as a superhero.

Things go right back to the way they were, Farrokh in Freddie’s lap to steal his food and getting shoved over, right into a long-suffering Brian, who gets a slice of meaty pizza wiggled in his face. John stifles a laugh behind his hand.

Yes, John’s middle child is quite _different._

But different isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  
-X-

  
“ _And I'll be wearing white when I come into your kingdom_  
_I'm as green as the ring on my little cold finger_

 _I've never known the lovin' of a man_  
_But it sure felt nice when he was holding my hand_  
_There's a boy here in town says he'll love me forever…”_

  
-X-

  
Carterbelle is wearing a prom dress with a heavy blush pink chiffon bottom, it spirals out around her waist, folding up and on top of itself to end around her heavy black combat boots. The upper piece is a sparkly halter-top, dotted in rhinestones that eagerly catch the light. Her midriff is playing peekaboo there and John feels the unconscious urge, as a father with little girls of his own, to cover her up. But she looks at him with the biggest smile on her face, bashful pink lips over her blue-wired braces.

“Hi, Mr. Deacon! We’re here for _the boy.”_ A mock-flirty wink, her hand is nestled in Bertie’s, the much taller skinny boy, nearing Brian’s height, with an ill-fitting somber tuxedo and his big blocky-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose. The nervous teen nods his assent and John moves aside to let them in.

They wait in the foyer and John sees his son hurry down the steps with an entourage.

Escaping the desperate clutches of Fred and Bri, the former chasing after him with a pocket comb and hair gel, while the latter is taking stereoscopic photographs. Lo has been fussing over his son’s outfit for days. Robert has agreed to be their driver for the evening, donning a top-hat and overcoat for the occasion. Michael’s nose is out of his books for once and Josh sends pure unadulterated glares at his brother’s partners, while the younger boys are just there to cheer him on.

They don’t understand the magnitude of what it means when Farrokh is in front of him.

When his boy that was never supposed to live past infancy, stands in front of him in a wide open red vest, nearly the same shade as his hair. A pair of obscenely tight dress pants, his gnarled scar and tubing on full display. A pointless bow-tie accent around his neck, red hair feathered and clinging to his scarred neck beneath his ears. Looking just like Roger had stepped out of one of their old band photo-shoots.

“I’m going now, Dad.”

John smiles. “I know.”

Then John watches as a girl with _Kaposi's Sarcoma_ scars takes his son’s right hand, and a shy boy with a stutter and a loving look takes the other.

John cries into Roger’s chest once the door closes behind him, the blonde doing the same into John’s receding hairline. Clinging to one another, and only deepening the hug when Fred and Bri join them. A little pow-pow as he sends his fifteen-year-old into the unknown.

He never thought he’d get to see that tiny hand occupied by another’s.

He never thought he’d see his boy grow up.

  
-X-

  
“ _The sharp knife of a short life,_  
_Well I've had just enough time_

 _So put on your best boys and I'll wear my pearls_  
_What I never did is done…”_

  
-X-

  
Carter and Bertie are the _push and pull_ of his son’s life.

Carterbelle is the tides. She is demanding, she is calm and serene in one moment, and a tempest in the next.

Loud and powerful, even in her illness. Her skin is ashy and curls limp, with visible Kaposi's Sarcoma, red and brown-black lesions on her hollow cheeks and lips. She is far paler than she ought to be and her light eyes are hard, turned steely. She looks like Freddie did once, when she and John first meet he sees his once-dying best-friend in her eyes. During the pandemic, before proper treatment or any sort of protocol.

But suddenly it doesn’t matter what John thinks.

Because his son is rushing towards her.

In one smooth move, he is in her bed and has his lips planted squarely on her own. The older girl has dark butterfly eyelashes brushing her cheeks and a sharp jawline that speaks of beauty before and even in illness. John can see the love written on his boy’s face, in the feel of chapped lips and the slight acidic tang of medication. For a moment, everything is like fireworks between them and then, it is over. 

John sees the love he so often has for Ronnie, mirrored in his boy’s eyes.

And he despises Carterbelle for a moment, because he was once the center of his son’s world. Now he will forever be second tier.

But the joy in his boy’s face makes it all worthwhile.

If Carter is the sea, then Bertie is the moon.

Bertie who is painfully shy and quiet, hindered by the speech impediment that has plagued him since early childhood.

John meets Bertie when his son drags him to a little record store in Kensington.

The inside is painted and grungy with graffiti, perfect for the youth of the new day and age. But one mural stands out from all the others. An ocean scene, still unfinished, the stenciled out shape of a dolphin, a few rough coral reef ideas, a barracuda… John recognizes his son’s freehand art anywhere. Knows that it doesn’t fit the aesthetic the store is going for. But as John watches his son push those glasses up Bertie’s nose, the boy bent practically in two so that Farrokh could reach. John realizes that the boy doesn’t care.

That Bertie just wants to see the same smile that John has learned to live for.

And he sees the moon in the boy who stays.

Whose speech may falter, but whose heart never does.

  
-X-

  
_“A penny for my thoughts, oh no I'll sell them for a dollar_  
_They're worth so much more after I'm a goner_  
_And maybe then you'll hear the words I been singin'_  
_Funny when you're dead how people start listenin’…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
John had stumbled across his son’s sketchbook a few months prior.

While tucking his boy into bed, it had fallen out of those charcoal stained hands. Farrokh’s tiny fingers were blackened from aggressively scrubbing at the canvas sheets and his lips were twisted, his tongue poking out from between them, inquisitive and searching even in sleep.

The bassist found the countless pictures of their family, still-life portraits of dogs and plants, and the numerous sketches of Carterbelle and Bertie. They looked so happy together. Carter dancing to music that he couldn’t hear, arms stretched up to the sky. Bertie reading with a small smile on his face, glasses slipping down his nose like a grandfather’s.

John had quickly and quietly closed the book, tucking it under his son’s alarmingly thin arm like he had once tucked a teddy-bear.

His _Peter Pan_ had grown up.

  
-X-

  
“ _The ballad of a dove_  
_Go with peace and love_

 _Gather up your tears, keep 'em in your pocket_  
_Save 'em for a time when your really gonna need 'em oh…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
“You aren’t going to die, Uncle Freddie.”

John isn’t there when his son crawls into Freddie’s sickbed, dodging IV lines like he was born to it… and he was.

Nine years old and as vaguely cyanotic as he always is, his tiny fingers are bluish and club slightly at the ends, and the corners of his mouth are always a little gray. He burrows his redhead into Freddie’s wracking chest, the little boy feels the knobby ribs there and is only quieted by the hand in his hair.

“I know that everybody dies. That it's just a part of life. That it's not meant to be a scary thing, it's just the ending of a really good story." Farrokh is crying into that narrow fuzzy chest, atrophied and frail as his own now, he can almost hear the way his uncle tries to gather up the words when he no longer has the will to speak. “But you aren’t supposed to _go_ yet. You aren’t _done_ yet.” He lifts his head in a pout and his eyes are dower and sad. “You promised me you’d look after _him._ ”

“….You _promised_.” The statement curls up at the end, almost like it’s a question.

“I did.” His Uncle Freddie rasps. “And I am so sorry, my darling. But I don’t think I can keep it.”

“You _can_. You’re just _giving up_.” Tears fall onto the blankets now, a steady pitter-patter on the fabric pooled in their laps. Farrokh pretends that he doesn’t hear, that he doesn’t comprehend. He has been pretending to be okay for most of his life; ever since the first moment he realized that when he screamed, their whole family trembled too. “I know it’s hard to fight sometimes, when it seems like there isn’t anything left to fight for…. But if you go Uncle Freddie, you won’t go _alone_. ...We can wait for my Mummy and Daddy together.”

The next time he’s hospitalized, he can stop fighting with the heart that has waged war for every breath, he can follow.

Hands clasped and resting atop Freddie’s tummy.

His Uncle Freddie _gasps_ then, it’s short and it’s pained and yet, it’s a sign of the way he crawls himself back to life.

Perhaps its the promise of a child’s death trailing after his like ashes in his wake. The promise of what it will do to John. Or maybe it’s the new drugs they try at Sunshine’s insistence, when he is ready to turn down the trial in the lieu of pain medicine and rest.

But Freddie survives that night, he survives the painful treatments and lives through the next year or so of continuing medical research and the doctors eventually get the cocktail right.

Freddie as a wealthy dying man, is entitled to try it as one of the first.

Sometimes the slightest ripples can have the biggest effects.

Sometimes a child’s hand can be a guiding lantern through the darkness.

Sometimes one miracle can cause another.

  
-X-

  
“ _The sharp knife of a short life,_  
_Well I've had just enough time_

_So put on your best boys, and I'll wear my pearls…”_

  
_-_ X-

  
John wonders if Farrokh and Freddie’s souls are intertwined. If one needs the other just to survive, if they’re linked for all eternity. Or if they’re like batteries, designed to repel one another. If in losing one, he keeps the other.

If it’s a race against time to keep them both.

If one day he’ll have to choose.

John wonders and John worries as he sees the painting his son is working on, the rough sketch unfinished.

An anatomically incorrect heart, with all the ventricles pumping, the veins and arteries flush with fluid, half of it is too small, atrophied and malformed, the heart Sunshine was born with. Surrounded by the shattered remains of what was once a pocket-watch. Torn leather, destroyed face, bent minute and second hands, a warped frame. 

But most important by far, was the calligraphy written in its orbit. 

" _If a thing loves; it is infinite.”_

 

 


	3. I heard the voices of friends, vanished and gone...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Couple more snippets of our boy's life, oh no, I'm getting attached! :O 
> 
> At ages: 6, 13, 16, 16 and 26. 
> 
> The songs featured are You Are My Sunshine by Johnny Cash, Angels On The Moon by Thriving Ivory, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond. :D
> 
> And the poem is Welcome to Holland by Emily Pearl Kingsley. Which hurts my heart every time I read it.

 

“ _Do you dream_  
_That the world will know your name_  
_So tell me your name_

 _And do you care_  
_About all the little things_  
_Or anything at all…”_

 

  
“A long long time ago the King and Queen of Ethiopia had a daughter, _Princess Andromeda..."_

Brian begins softly, staring up at the constellations in the night sky, the same ones he's been tracing since he was as young as the wan six-year-old in his arms, that tiny red head pillowed on his shoulder. Brian’s spindly fingers are carding down the boy’s heaving naked back, the tubes and wires are spiraling out from everywhere and its like trying to rock a pin-cushion to sleep. Yet he manages, the tiny boy is recovering from yet another open-heart surgery and John has finally crashed for what has to be the first time in days, with Ronnie in the cot next to the empty bed. They’re coiled around each other and Brian feels a pang in his chest. He and Chrissie are currently divorcing, and he’s sure any of their children being so ill would have caused the dissolution of their marriage much earlier. Yet John and Ronnie are still very much in love.

"Queen Cassiopeia and her daughter were very beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that Cassiopeia boasted about her beauty and said that she was even prettier than Juno, the Queen of the gods and Neptune's own nymphs. He was the god of the sea and he grew angry at Cassiopeia's prideful remarks, so he sent a terrifying sea monster to ravage the Ethiopian coast."

Brian plays at being a monster for a moment, putting on a deeper voice and playfully gnashing his teeth, the little boy weakly squeals in a delighted sort of fright. Sleepy still, yawning into Brian’s neck. A surge of fondness just for Farrokh is nestled there. A soft spot, like the chink in Smaug's armor, that needs covering up or he is going to be very hurt, very soon. 

"The King wanted to save his people, so he consulted with an oracle, someone who could divine the will of the gods. And the oracle said that the only way to appease the sea god and stop the slaughter was to sacrifice the most precious thing to him. His daughter, Andromeda." 

_The most precious thing._

"He had her chained to a sea cliff and given to the monster at daybreak." 

The little lad in his arms shifts, so he’s looking up at Brian with eyes that look far older than even his oldest child’s or Robert’s. The boy is clearly in pain, but he doesn’t cry, he just watches.

"But," The lanky guitarist turned doting uncle quickly cuts in, stopping in his mad pacing, staring out the window into the night sky. "That was when Perseus found her. A demigod son of Jupiter and the hero who'd killed Medusa, legend says he fell in love with her the minute he saw her. He'd thought she was a statue at first, she was so beautiful, until he realized that she was crying. After she told him who she was and where she came from, he went to see the King and Queen of Ethiopia. He told them that he would kill the monster and save them, but only if he could marry the princess at the end of his ordeal. They agreed." 

Brian then regals his charge with the tale of Perseus' long bloody battle with the sea monster. A fight that ends with a dastardly sword-fight and finally, with the beast being turned into stone by Medusa' severed head.

"Once Perseus finished with the beast, he freed Andromeda and she joyously fell into his arms, agreeing to their marriage on the very spot. Together they lived, happily ever after." 

He moves towards the window-seat. " _Look!"_  The starry-eyed man delicately points out the curve of Andromeda in the night sky, a little boy's wise green eyes observing tamely. 

"There she is, the Princess Andromeda. Right between her mother and father. Waiting chained to the rock for Perseus to come and free her from her bindings. He's over there, you see, fighting the monster with his mighty sword." 

Brian has always empathized with her. 

_Andromeda, the chained woman, the bound woman._

"Wow." The tiny boy timidly raises a small trembling hand, as if trying to _touch_ , as if trying to free Andromeda himself, the tubes and wires holding him fast.

   
-X-

  
_“I want to feel_  
_All the chemicals inside_  
_I want to feel_

 _I want a sunburn_  
_Just to know that I'm alive_  
_To know I'm alive.”_

  
-X-

  
Farrokh Harold Meddows Deacon is thirteen years old the first time he sticks a Marlboro cigarette between his lips. 

He lights the cancer-stick with a fancy silver engraved lighter that he'd nicked from his Dad's desk a few weeks prior. John Deacon hadn’t used it in years. Probably because he gets his kicks from sobbing soundlessly in bathrooms now instead.

The barely-there teenager is sitting on a gross old bench outside the Children's Hospital, the place where he’s a certified frequent flyer. Surrounded by a bunch of other hollow-eyed losers, the young guy in a rumpled suit who’s probably just been diagnosed with something scary and a bunch of older folks with oxygen tanks or gaping holes in their necks and cigarettes still resting in their tangerine-stained fingers. _Gross_. Even a few hypocritical doctors are in on the act, eagerly huffing tar into their lungs to keep going. 

It tastes disgusting and smells even worse. But he finishes the ciggie anyway, tosses the butt on the ground like an asshole, and contemplates what to do next. 

He can go back upstairs and join his family in their veritable wake as they wait for the results of his latest scans. He can toss himself off a bridge. Or he can stay right where he is, holding a pack of cigarettes that he's just bought with the money he got on his last birthday, just a few days before all of this. 

Honestly, he shouldn't have been able to buy the damn things at all. It’s supposed to be illegal. But when you run into a convenience store on the ground floor of a kid's hospital like the devil is riding your ass and you look like you haven't slept in a hundred years, and your hands tremble when you hand over ten quid: apparently that earns you pity points and no carding. 

He’d warbled some shit about going down to buy new colored pencils in the gift-shop, when he’d left the room with a jacket over his pajama bottoms. There’s gauze bunched up over the tubes in his chest and he gasps in a way that means he’s pushed himself too hard by taking the stairs instead of the elevators.

He’d wanted to try out for school track this year. He wants to run, he loves to run in the same way he loves to draw and paint. But instead of giving him a clean bill of health at his usual check-up, they send him for more scans.

More scans don’t bode well for his track dreams.

...

He was about five or six years old, when he first realized that he was going to die sooner than everyone else. 

What was so scary then, isn’t so scary now.

He is _sick_ , it is one of the multiple facets of his character, of who he is as a person and he hates it. Yet it’s nothing new. It’s an unalienable truth, something that everyone in their family has learned to cope with in their own uniquely fucked up way.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter is, that he is a _big brother._ He has three little brothers who are supposed to look to him for guidance and advice and he is supposed to be able to protect them. Yet those same little boys have seen him doubled over in agony with vomit, blood and who knows what else pouring down his face. They have seen him with tubes down his throat and shooting out of his neck. They have seen their father crying because of him. They have seen their mother fall to pieces because of him. They are scarred by simply being in his _blast radius_ and he hates himself for it.

For being the most _problematic_ little brother and the most _incapable_ big brother.

A thirteen-year-old Farrokh lights another cigarette. 

It is so extremely _pathetic_ what he’s doing. He already knows that. 

But he also really doesn’t give a single shit. 

He knows that smoking is bad for him. Everyone knows that now, it’s kind of common knowledge by this point. He’s seen all the PSAs on TV, babies in incubators with shriveled up translucent bodies because their mothers had smoked while pregnant, people with stomas, disembodied lungs full of sludge and some that never grew to normal size. 

He could even name and spell several components of the cig balanced in-between his fingers. _Formaldehyde... carcinogen, embalming fluid. Arsenic... poison, carcinogen. Hexamine... lighter fluid. Nicotine, obviously. Toluene... a chemical used in making paint._ It makes him want to vomit.

But those feelings mean he’s _alive._

A baby is wheeled by him then, a toddler in a wheelchair with a familiar knotted scar running down his chest.

He freezes and then coughs when the smoke gets all choked up in his chest. His battered lungs screaming at him. 

It leaves him sputtering and wheezing, his elbows pressed against his knees. 

For an instant, he can’t _breathe._  He knows the feeling well.

Staring after that baby boy, he sees _himself._

Laying flat on his back, strewn out like a broken toy on the operating table in theatre, with a plastic mask held over his nose and mouth. He wonders what flavor he’d chosen to inhale in that memory, because the anesthesia at most Children's Hospitals would come sweetened like root beer, watermelon, strawberry, bubblegum or cotton candy. Strawberry is his favorite by far though, because it’s the least overpowering and that way he can pretend that he’s going to sleep in a strawberry patch instead of an operating room, about to be sliced open. 

Before every operation, no matter how routine, he would always hug his family tightly as one massive clot, keeping them both together and precariously near to his heart, before blowing them a showman's kiss as he’s wheeled away. Trying to assuage some of the worry that he sees reflected in their eyes. 

 _Apparently_ unafraid.

But he’s _not._

Not _really._

He is not _Sunshine smiles_  every day of his life. He likes to pretend that he is, for his father, for his uncles, for his Mum and his siblings. But sometimes, he just breaks down in tears. Because it isn’t _fair._ Why is _this_ his life? 

A second oversized jacket settles itself over his shoulders, big enough to be considered a blanket.

He instantly wraps himself up in the damned fuzzy thing and let his first ever box of cigarettes fall soundlessly into the dirt and lie _innocuous_  in the dead grass at his feet. He buries his face in the faux-fur coat, making a low pitched keening noise as he realizes just how much it smells like his dear Uncle Freddie. He hadn't even realized that humans had distinctive smells, but apparently they  _do_. 

"I sincerely hope for your sake that _those_ aren't yours, my darling.” Freddie’s eyes glance down at the half-smashed and obviously opened pack of cigarettes between the teen’s feet.

Sunshine doesn’t say anything, he doesn't have to. Freddie has always known him in a way that nobody else does or can. It’s why he’s grown up speaking fluent _Gujarati_ along with English and calling Freddie his _Mhota papa_ or _Farrokh Mhota papa_. Easily switching to the appropriate language with the proper company. He considers his Uncle Freddie’s parents to be his _Bapuji and Baa_ and has been immersed in Parsi culture for most of his formative years. Perhaps it’s why he and his Uncle Freddie are so close. They grow up with same culture, the same songs, the same _name_ etched on their souls like a Rosetta Stone. 

He is as close as his Uncle Freddie will ever come to having a human child.

“Oh, _Bhatrija.”_ Freddie kneels down in front of his trembling boy and tugs lightly until Farrokh is cradled in his arms, slumped forwards to be held against his chest like he’s a sick baby again. The hint of a beard on Freddie’s face soothes him, grown to cover the marks left behind by the Kaposi’s Sarcoma. _(This is before he loves a girl with the same scars on her skin, and presses featherlight kisses to each blemish, seeing beauty where beauty is)._

He sobs into his Uncle because he’s so sick of pretending to be someone he isn’t.

 _Something_ , he isn’t.

"I don't know what to do." The _Gujarati_ is a security blanket, it reminds him of pop-up picture books and ancient Zoroastrian stories from his Bapuji’s lips.

Yet the words themselves taste like ash and air on his tongue. Fit to burn him into nothingness where he sits and yet also to finally set him free.

Dark, smoldering eyes look at the remains of the almost full pack on the ground and then back up to him again. “Well, _that_ is certainly not the answer, dear.”

Farrokh wretchedly nods, he knows that, he knows too much, still holding onto his Freddie for all he’s worth. “This isn't _fair._ ” 

“No, it isn’t.”

A few of the nearby nurses hurriedly push their patients back inside, as if frightened by the crazy kid on a bench crying into his Uncle for all he’s worth. 

His breath hitches as he smothers another sob.

“Ah, ah, ah, _no_. _No_. Darling, please let it out. It’s okay to cry when you need it, lovie. It’s okay. It’s just _me_.” Not his Dad or any of his cousins or siblings, not Uncle Bri or Uncle Rog. Just his Uncle Freddie who understands in a way none of them ever could. Looking at him with all the love in the world nestled in his eyes. It is no wonder Farrokh has always found another home in his Uncle Freddie's arms. 

So he cries, loud visceral, broken, pained and almost animalistic sobs that feel like they go on for ages. 

There is no _world._  

There is just _them._

Eventually the wavering wails die in his sore throat and he is left shaking, wholly spent.

But instead of filling the silence, Freddie holds him close and the boy is finally at peace. The smashed cigs laying forgotten in the dirt. 

He wouldn't pick up another pack again. 

He didn't need to. 

  
-X-

  
_“And don't tell me if I'm dying_  
_'Cause I don't want to know_  
_If I can't see the sun_  
_Maybe I should go…”_

  
-X-

  
Luke Deacon lives in _Holland._

Well, not really Holland. It’s just an analogy.

An analogy like the way his Daddy is _Durga_ , juggling everything like a Hindu goddess with dozens of arms. John Deacon is  _amazing_. He plays in a really cool rock band with Luke’s Uncles and can write some of the best music in the whole wide world.

He taught Luke how to play the bass guitar when he was really little and even got him his own for his seventh birthday.

He loves all of them to the moon and back and tells them so, and he never ever cries _(sometimes he goes into the bathroom or another room for a long time during sad stuff, but that’s because he’s praying. Mummy said so. So Luke prays too. On his scabby knees and everything)._ Daddy helps him practice the hardest pieces of sheet music and his sight-reading for church choir. And he is the very best at claw-machine games, no matter what or where, he always wins. And they always donate the prizes to one of the nearby hospitals in big baskets, whenever they have the time. Which makes it special. 

Luke's Daddy also makes Holland a fun place to live. 

They don’t really miss Italy _(he’s never known it),_ his Daddy and Mama left Italy for Sunshine. Even though they were supposed to go with him too. They got stuck in Holland instead though, and so did the rest of them. But Holland isn't a bad place per say, it’s just _different_ from Italy. 

Daddy makes it fun though and so does Sunshine. 

An expected trip to Italy is a metaphor for a healthy baby. While ending up in Holland is a baby like Sunshine. 

The analogy came from a much beloved poem by Emily Pearl Kingsley, one that he knows for certain that his Daddy keeps in his wallet. _Welcome to Holland._

Basically the premise is this: every family dreams of this big trip to Italy, full of fancy foods and sights and all the things you've been waiting for your whole life. A healthy baby. You buy guidebooks and learn a few key phrases and get so impossibly excited, all full of your big dreams. You board the plane, spend hours in flight and it touches down, only for an attendant to say: _Welcome to Holland._

_Your baby isn't healthy._

_Your baby has a disability._

_Your baby is sick._

_Your baby is different._

You aren't in Italy. You're in Holland and you're stuck there. _Forever._

But Holland isn't disgusting, it isn't bad or vile or filled with famine and pestilence. It's just _not Italy._ It's not the place you've always dreamed of. It doesn't have what you wanted. Suddenly, it's a whirlwind of new guidebooks, of being confused, of not knowing the language, of meeting new people you may never have known otherwise. It's mourning for the trip you never got to have. For the fact that your permanent home will always be in Holland. It doesn't matter how many subsequent children you have, how many Italy trips you take or have taken before, it doesn't change the fact that your roots will always be in Holland instead. 

And those dreams will always be a hard loss. 

But Holland has _tulips._ Holland has _windmills._ Holland even has _Rembrandts._

His big brother Farrokh was born with magnificent art skills that manifested from toddlerhood. Their Sunshine, whose laugh is so infectious it can light up a whole room. Sunshine who is the best at hair and makeup by far _(which isn't saying much as they are all pretty sucky besides Uncle Jim and Uncle Freddie),_ who dances around and around to music nobody else can hear and who helps to raise Luke and his little brother Cami with all the burgeoning love in his great big _(broken)_ heart. 

Apparently other kids don’t climb into their older brothers' wheelchairs whenever they get tired, and can’t spell big words like _port-a-cath_ or  _dichloralphenazone_ , as if they are simple and commonplace. To Luke they always have been.

Luke Deacon can’t imagine a life that didn't start in Holland. 

It’s where they belong. 

  
-X-

  
“ _Don't wake me 'cause I'm dreaming_  
_Of angels on the moon_  
_Where everyone you know_  
_Never leaves too soon.”_

  
_-_ X-

  
They are lying out on the beach, staring up at the night sky when Sunshine tells them.

Carter’s ankle is locked around his own and Bertie’s fingers have reached over to caress the long puckered scar on his chest that dips down into nowhere.

He needs to tell them.

Staring up at _Andromeda_ , he finds the courage.

He catches Bertie’s hand and laces their fingers together.

"...Do you know why I love the ocean?" 

His voice sounds like a tinny recording, an audiobook left on for far too long, a familiar voicemail message. But Carter just shakes her head, Bertie hums his no. Farrokh reaches up and toys with the end of his tubing, twirling the short cord around his thin freckled fingers. A tic. 

“The ocean is the beginning and the end. It's everything. And that means that when everything fades away, back into the sea, that I mattered. I mattered just as much as anyone else. It doesn't matter how short my life may or may not be, because in the end, it had the same worth as Mark Twain's or even Albert Einstein's!" 

He thinks of the cemetery they passed while driving in. Lines and lines of smooth blemish-free headstones, peppered with flowers and small stuffed animals. Some of the stones were cut with pretty intricate designs and would be almost beautiful, if their intended purpose was disregarded.

“I was born with a broken heart and… I’m not going to get any better. There’s no wonder drug, no miracle, no magic treatment. You both are going to outlive me. If we have kids, I won’t live to see them grow up.” They don’t say anything and he soldiers on.

“So if you two don't want to be around something like that, I fully understand." He should raise his head. He should look at them. But he just _can’t._ "Wouldn't be the first time I've scared somebody off." He should stop there. But he doesn’t. The words he didn’t know how to say, just keep coming. "I wish I could say my heart won’t impact our relationship, but I _can't,_ I don't make it a habit to lie to people. I've been sick since forever, so what's normal for me, isn't actually normal for a lot of people. And I get that, I really do. It's easy to disappoint people like this. Sometimes you don't even realize you're doing it." He’s _crying. Shit._

_Shit. Shit. Shit._

"Please don't feel like you _have_ to be here." _Don’t pretend to love me out of pity_. "If you want to go, then go." _Please don't leave me here alone_. "I'm not going to stop you, I'm giving you an out." 

They don’t say anything at first, and then it’s Bertie.

Quiet, shy, stuttering Bertie who is livid. “Y-Y-You’re pretty full of y-yourself, you know t-that?” 

Carter joins him, she’s sniffling suspiciously and hiding her face so they can’t see. “ _Dumb boy_ , life royally sucks bollocks sometimes. But we’ve got each other and we’ll be with each other, for as long as we’ve got. _Promise?”_ Finally looking at him with the teary eyes of someone who understands the frailty of a human life.

What does he do then?

He starts crying harder. Ugly deep hiccuping sobs that make him even grosser to look at, with blotchy skin and teary streaks down his cheeks. “I love you both so much.”

His mascara is running something fierce, but he doesn’t care.

He holds the loves of his life and doesn’t care… about anything else, anything but loving and living their lives together.

_(They have one child together, her name is Caroline and sometimes it’s Sweet Caroline and Caroline-Sunshine, as she’s managed to inherent the same red and too bright green eyes as their own Sunshiny fool)._

  
_-_ X-

  
“ _And do you believe_  
_In the day that you were born_  
_Tell me do you believe…_

 _And do you know_  
_That every day's the first_  
_Of the rest of your life.”_

  
-X-

  
Caroline looks just like her Daddy.

John caresses her soft baby plush cheek, just as he has her father and her aunts and uncles before her. Her little feet are child-chubby and warm, in the way her father’s never were at that age. She has baby-fine lashes and a milky smile to go with them. Her eyes are the same vibrant green as Sunshine’s, she has the same tufty inexplicable red hair and John wonders again where that even came from.

He sees his son in the curves of his granddaughter’s face.

A familiar lullaby plays on his lips.

He has never been a singer. Yet he has often sung to all his children, Sunshine in particular.

The song he sings isn’t the one he first thinks of.

Singing _Sweet Caroline_ to his granddaughter doesn’t feel right. Not with how Sunshine had sang it for most of Carterbelle’s pregnancy, pressing kisses to the bump that was growing into their little girl. It had become a little love song for the two of them. _“Sweet Caroline… Good times never seemed so good! Sweet Caroline… I believe they never could! Sweet Caroline…”_

So instead, he sings the lullaby he so often sang to his sick son lying in the NICU and then in the PICU as he got older, despite everyone's predictions that he wouldn't.

“ _You are my sunshine_  
_My only sunshine_  
_You make me happy_  
_When skies are grey_  
_You'll never know, dear_  
_How much I love you…_

_Please don't take my sunshine away…”_

John’s voice hitches and he bends to press a kiss to the little heaving chest without a scar. His tears pepper her delicate baby-soft skin.

_"Please don't take my Sunshine away…”_

  
-X-

 _“Yeah you can tell me all your thoughts_  
_About the stars that fill polluted skies_  
_And show me where you run to_  
_When no one's left to take your side_  
_Don't tell me where the road is_

 _'Cause I just don't want to know_  
_No I don't want to know_

_And don't tell me if I'm dying…”_

  
_-X-_

 

 


End file.
